Technology
Jul. 15th, 2005 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumMost of the things we take for granted today, especially geeky things, are things invented in the 20th century.
But there are quite a few things, mostly cultural, that could have been invented hundreds of years ago.
Games, in particular, could have been invented two hundred years ago. Benjamin Franklin played chess, a game that was already ancient.
Why could he not also have played Scrabble? The key obstacle to Scrabble's invention are probably the tiles -- to create so many uniform wooden tiles before the Industrial Revolution was probably prohibitively expensive.
A brief search turned up this historic games site, which sells cloth boards and replica pieces for games with long histories.
All these games are symbolic in nature; I wonder if any game existed that tried to tell a story, in the vein of modern role playing games, or games with descriptive cards and spaces like Monopoly or Life.
But there are quite a few things, mostly cultural, that could have been invented hundreds of years ago.
Games, in particular, could have been invented two hundred years ago. Benjamin Franklin played chess, a game that was already ancient.
Why could he not also have played Scrabble? The key obstacle to Scrabble's invention are probably the tiles -- to create so many uniform wooden tiles before the Industrial Revolution was probably prohibitively expensive.
A brief search turned up this historic games site, which sells cloth boards and replica pieces for games with long histories.
All these games are symbolic in nature; I wonder if any game existed that tried to tell a story, in the vein of modern role playing games, or games with descriptive cards and spaces like Monopoly or Life.
